Benjamin Wurgaft • Cultured Meat and Three Futures for Flesh

A program of the Wolf Humanities Center's 2017-18 Forum on Afterlives
February 28, 2018

Benjamin Wurgaft
Visiting Scholar in Anthropology, MIT

Laboratory-grown meat, also called ‘cultured meat,’ has loomed large in the public imagination ever since 2013, when the Dutch scientist Mark Post created the world’s first cell-cultured hamburger. Could using cell culture and tissue engineering techniques to “grow” meat from samples of animal muscle solve many problems plaguing industrial meat production? Find out as Benjamin Wurgaft draws from years of ethnographic research within the world of cultured meat. In a wide-ranging talk that encompasses science, food, philosophy, and futurism, he describes three versions of the future of flesh that cultured meat could bring about: the utopian, the dystopian, and the weird.